Żnin Sugar Plant

This project is about reusing and recycling complex architectural structures on the very big scale.

The project Żnin Sugar Plant is primarily about revitalization, i.e. restoring life to a forgotten facility. In this particular case, the restoration of the town of Żnin and its inhabitants, the site around which the life of the local community was going on.
The Żnin Sugar Plant is located in Poland, in the city of Żnin, with a population of approximately 13,500.
In the past, the Sugar Plant provided a workplace for a significant part of the town's inhabitants. After the sugar factory was closed in terms of production and area, an urban gap appeared, empty area on the map. Our goal was to restore this area to the city and its inhabitants.
Finally, we managed to adapt the former sugar factory to perform new functions, meet modern building standards and regulations, leaving its form unchanged and returning to its life in a new form. In a strictly architectural sense, we have not built anything new, we have fully used what has already been built.The programming challenge was to turn a strictly industrial area into a tourist area. It required the proper design of new functions and the use of every, even the smallest building that was part of the former technological line of the factory.

A huge design challenge was to adapt the factory to functions more related to people and their needs. The sugar factory was designed for machines and production, not for humans. The scale of internal spaces and their shape resulted precisely from the size of machines and technological lines. Our task was to completely transform this principle and adapt the factory to human needs such as housing, recreational functions, gastronomy, culture, conferences.

The main conservation assumption was to leave the building's architecture as original as possible, which we managed to achieve, adding only what is necessary to meet design and functional requirements. New constructions appeared only where it was needed, often as an additional support to the existing structure and not as a replacement.
When designing the Żnin Sugar Plant we put a lot of emphasis on ecological issues at every project level. From materials to ventilation and energy issues to the use of construction waste. The subject which, in our opinion, was very important for ecology and economy was the problem of cleaning the facades of historic buildings and their conservation. We realized how huge the differences between different technologies are. That is why we focused on very gentle cleaning of the historic structure and leaving a patina of time. We removed only the largest dirt and secured key areas against further damage. Which, with such a large scale, had a significant impact on the consumption of water and chemicals.